What can you do when Google Fred Penalty hits your website

What can you do when Google Fred Penalty hits your website

As we’ve seen, Google won’t tell you exactly what’s in the Fred algorithm. That’s why some SEO professionals had to make some inferences.

However, Gary Illyes did offer an important piece of advice about how to avoid getting hit with a Fred penalty.

This past April, at the AMA session during the SMX West conference, Illyes said that the answer to Fred is in the webmaster quality guidelines.

So here’s what you can do to stay in the good graces of Google:

• Provide high-quality content – In your content marketing efforts, make sure that your articles are top-notch. If you have to, hire a professional writer to give you the best quality. Also, strive for longform content as that tends to cover subjects more exhaustively.

• Avoid “forced” backlinks – If you’re in the habit of buying backlinks from people who own their own private blog networks (PBNs), stop that practice immediately. Even “honest” guest-posting can get you into trouble if you’re forcing unnatural backlinks from low-quality sites. Instead, strive to produce quality content (see above) and let Google’s algorithm push it to the top of the SERPs.
• Avoid excessive ads – The Fred update also hit sites with an abundance of ads. Although it’s unclear how many ads is “too many” for Fred, you can use common sense. If you think people will find your site annoying because it has a couple of pop-ups, a video ad in the corner, ads in the middle of the content, and banner ads all over the page, you can be fairly certain that you have “too many” ads.